Photo: Everett
This is great because Pullman made for a pretty decent president. The speech Whitmore orated in the original film before flying off for the final battle against the invading aliens has become apop culture fixture, joining similar scenes fromBraveheartandHoosiersin the pantheon of cinematic inspirational speeches.
Here’s the text, in case you forgot.
“Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind.”
“And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: ‘We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive!’ Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”
Good stuff, right? Filming the scene was also weirdly synchronistic: It was shot in front of the hanger that once housed the Enola Gay, one of the bombers that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan on Aug. 6, 1945.The scene was filmed exactly 50 years later.
Complexhas a fantastic oral history of the speech, in which Devlin revealed that he told Emmerich during the writing process they should give Whitmore “a kind of a St. Crispin’s Day speech,” referencing a similarly famous speech in Shakespeare’sHenry V.
Pullman toldComplexthat he researched various acclaimed speeches from the 20th century to inform his recitation, drawing particular inspiration from a speech Robert Kennedy made shortly after finding out Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot. He “just knocked this one out of the park,” Devlin said. “None of us were prepared for it until his first rehearsal, and then we were just staring in awe and wonder.”
That said, the speech does contain a mangling of an even more famous line. Whitmore’s declaration, “We will not go quietly into the night,” seemed to be a reference toDylan Thomas' classic poem"Do not go gentle into that good night," though Devlin and Emmerich haven’t ever mentioned it. Interestingly, the poem is recited in full inInterstellar, the2014 movie about humans trekking to other planetsrather than the other way around.
source: people.com
